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Tell Us the State of Your Block

By The New York Times January 18, 2011 4:24 pmJanuary 18, 2011 4:24 pm

The president gives the State of the Union, the governor the State of the State and, on Wednesday, the mayor will deliver the State of the City. These addresses tend to follow a similar outline. The official in question lists recent accomplishments, outlines future challenges, and implores everyone — invariably, and often with brow furrowed — to do more with less.

But sometimes, the canvas is so vast that it seems impersonal. So, on the eve of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s 10th State of the City address, we are asking City Room readers:

What is the state of your block?

Yes, it is cold and miserable outside, and yes, we have decreed this “Summer Fun Day” on City Room, but in the case of the state of your block, we are being quite serious. How was the last year? How are your neighbors doing? Who has moved in or moved out in the last 12 months? Anyone you know get mugged since the last State of the City? Stores turn over? Buildings go vacant? How’s parking?

Feel free to pick whatever descriptions or anecdotes, in whatever realms, you feel will answer this question, but please, we are not interested in the State of Your Marriage or the State of Your Basement. So warned, have fun. Be sure to include your borough, as well as your street and whichever streets or avenues it is between. You may of course remain anonymous. We’ll publish our favorites either Wednesday or later in the week.

You probably only want New York residents’ responses, but I will respond anyway.

I live on the 1700 block of Sherwood St. in Missoula, MT. The state of our block is this: 3 homes are up for sale, although the house that was empty & infested with woodpeckers & squirrels has finally sold. The man with the toilet in his front yard for the past 3 years has now replaced it with a bath tub and 2 saw horses. And the neighbor’s son has finally moved out of the trailer that was parked on her lawn, but his trailer, rotweiller, German Sheppard, and several dirt bikes are still there in what is now more of a mud pit than a lawn. Our family’s rooster has found a new home, so the neighborhood is a little quieter this winter. And old gardener is still getting around, though he gave us quite a scare with his fall & hospitalization. He is now walking again, & received an adult-sized tricycle for his birthday, so I think he will give us a few more years of heck and fresh buttercup squash. You might ask why anyone in their right mind would live in this neighborhood. The answer is simple: in the summer time, we all trade home-grown veggies, plants, and fresh eggs over the fences, even as we complain about eachother’s music-blasting & beer can habits; we all know eachother by name, share lawn mowers, and the river is in walking distance. The coming year should be great.

State of my block: new stoplight added at southern intersection, leading to more idling diesel trucks and more bad air coming in the window. Three derelict buildings now only two (out of 12 total buildings on block), as renovation has begun on the building next door. Although pugnacious neighbors across the street seem to have disappeared, their stoop is not cleared or marked with footprints in snow, so that building is vacant, bringing vacant total back up to three. Yum Yum Deli opened on north corner and was immediately marked with gang graffiti; closed after a few months. Competing gang graffiti painted on southern end of block and then erased after being reported to nyc.gov but subsequently repainted in the same area, just in a less visible way. Shooting across north intersection just before midnight sometime during the summer. Tree on block has survived. Bronx, NY – Alexander Ave between 140th and 141st St.

My block is one of quiet, peacefulness and its been like that for quite sometime. I live on Cooper street in upper manhattan near 207th and with the old year behind me i can definetely say its been a rough one for everyone on my block, I’ve seen some friends move deep into the bronx because the rent in manhattan has gotten so high no one with less than a 50K salary can live there. Even with the inflation in rent it doesnt keep the drug dealers who make more than 100K a week slow down, less than 4 blocks over on Post Avenue i’ve seen more unmarked police cars than anywhere else in the city. And the next train station over, Dyckman Street, is a hot bed for marijuana, coke, and other misc drug use, there are sweeps and raids almost twice a month and there is only one precint to keep all of this in check (34th Precint). I still think its a good neighborhood though for the most part the people during the day are friendly, the business’s in the immeadiate area are doing overall good yet can be doing a lot better of course, the only place ive noticed thats closed was a real estate agency which was selling apartments (and i think renting as well) with broker fees at ridiculous prices in a low rent neighborhood!. The neighborhood is not what i would hope to raise my kids in but its good enough for now but things need to be changed and upper manhattan and the bronx need to stop being so neglected by the city. I always hear more about brooklyn and queens on the news only because they have a higher homicide rate. Over here its not the people who kill people its the drugs and depression that cripple us.

I’ve lived in my neighborhood for 4 years now. I recently moved to a place on Montrose Ave between Graham and Humboldt. Since I’ve moved in, we’ve gotten a sweet tattoo shop, a strangely vast-yet-unappealing deli/coffeeshop, and a couple of new, fancy bodegas that seem to cater to the five-dollar a stick organic butter crowd. So that’s the good news. But the most obvious change on the block has been a noticeable uptick in crime.

An apartment on the ground floor of my building was burglarized just a few weeks ago and I’ve walked past a crime scene where a girl was sobbingly telling her mugging tale to cops – less than a block away from the subway.

Since then it’s been a pretty heavily guarded area. A beat cop on most corners, sometimes teams of two or three. I guess enough people need their butter guarded that someone took notice. All for the best, I guess.

The state of my block:
When I first moved here a year ago, there were several empty store fronts and stalled construction projects. Within the last 3 months, I have noticed a definite uptick in activity. The storefronts are being converted into retail space, new restaurants and bars are moving in and facades of the buildings around us are losing their sidewalk sheds to reveal new or restored facades.

Before you think all is rosey; one the area is not gentrified by any stretch of the imagination, which actually suits me and probably would frighten others away. Second, the traffic eastward on 38th street is atrocious from the Lincoln Tunnel in the mornings and turns into a cacophony of horns; the same is true for the trafic traveling west on 37th street towards the tunnel in the evening.

Finally the streets are absolutely filthy! There are days where I stumble over the trash. Don’t even get me started on what it was like when it wasn’t being picked up during the blizzard; the only thing I will tell you is that I have become obsessed with cleanliness in my own apt. as a result.

The trash on 8th and 9th is equally awful. It just amazes me how careless people are with their garbage, especailly when there is a trash can just a couple of feet away.

There are a couple of business associations who try to keep up, but honestly is really is just too much. One day without them really is truly disgusting.

As far as safety is concerned, I don’t feel unsafe, but I am careful about my surrounding. I do see cops often walking up and down 8th and 9th.

Don’t get me wrong, I loe my neighborhood, just giving you may state of my block.

I think the state of my block/neighborhood has two very different faces.

The front of my block experienced a fair amount of services from the City. From trees cut down due to storm damage, street cleaning/plowing, to the replacement of a street light. That is the front. What happens in the shared alley behind the house is a completely different story.

My neighbors are pretty uncivilized. Their disturbing behavior ranges from refusal to park in their own perfectly free parking spaces to using my garbage bags to prevent others from parking in a space that does not belong to them. Others can rent their own parking spaces but block yours for their own convenience.

When they have parties, they tell their guests to have just as little respect for other people’s property. You are actually cursed at when you tell them move their cars and not leave their food around for the animals. As a result, the block experienced a family of racoons last summer.

They hammer and saw furniture at 11PM and leave their floodlights on all night so no one else can sleep. People pick up after their dogs, but throw it away in your can in a paper towel rather than a bag.

I think the state of my block/neighborhood has degenerated to the point where you can actually identify animalistic/id behavior and tendencies just as if it were being described on a nature program. I was compelled to install a video camera and put my garbage can away.

we have car break-ins on a weekly basis and the local precinct takes it all in stride.

i hear that back in the 80s cars were actually stolen all the time, so i guess we are better off and the cops seem to think so too.

other than that our neighborhood is quiet, mellow and beautiful with tree-lined streets. most neighbors are easy going, except of course for the occasional home owners who have been known to slash your tires if you park in front of their house. apparently there is a queens-wide understanding that such an act can make you (and your tires) vulnerable. our friend sure wishes someone would have sent him the memo when he moved to forrest hills.

This is the 200 Block of Parkville Ave, Brooklyn and our block aint that strong..

Not seeing a plow until 7 days after the boxing day storm, it highlighted the lack of respect a block at the crossroads of Brooklyn.

Several homes in foreclosure have been picked apart by businesses acting like criminals and remain eyessores and a blight that so detracts from Kensington. Even The new construction units are empty of residents and the block is devoid of hope as homeowners are seeing values plummeting at a rate to rival the stock market of the great crash.

The new charter school down the block is open but active construction as the former st Rose of Lima becomes a federally funded entitiy on property that is wholly owned by the church but protected from civl liability in the Church abuse cases…Heavy equiptment and constuction of a new school building is taking palce as classes for the youngest of students report for the day.

The street like the school is in transition, bordering little pakistan and the heavily jewish enclaves of Midwood and Boro Park. The church next to the school sees very few people on sundays, mostly immigrants going to the spanish services.

This block, having very litttle sense of community for the writer who has lived within of a mile of his current adddres for over 30 years, the state of our block, our boro and our city is decling rapidly…

On our block, 1 St between 7th and 8th Avenues in Park Slope, you have those that promptly and thoroughly shovel the sidewalk, and you have those that do the minimal. The minimalists, in deep snow will shovel only a shovel wide path, and when little snow, like today, they don’t shovel at all. So today it was rather treacherous walking on the packed down slush.

Now the shovelers and the minimalists are not distributed randomly. They are in groups. At the start of the block on my side there are eight minimalists in a row. And then on up everybody shovels. I guess the lack of civic responsibility is contagious.

The State of my Block (15th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in Manhattan) is frustrated and concerned. Our residential block is trying to get the attention of our Elected Officials and our Community Board to correct a case of inappropriate discretion by the Board of Standards and Appeals.

They refused to gather community input or do an environmental assessment on a proposed midblock development project which will literally tower over buildings around it for a mile North and South. It is a case of inappropriate zoning, and sets a terrible precedent for the low-to-midrise character of Lower Chelsea. The Community has organized to fight this out-of-scale development (with over 1000 signatures so far), but could sure use the support of our representatives.

I totally agree with Jason, I live in Williamsburg, near Graham Avenue and Metropolitan (L train stop) in what is supposed to be an up and coming yuppie neighborhood. There have been so many burglaries and break ins and even the Key Food Supermarket was robbed during the early evening hours!

I have been here since the 90’s when it was mafia controlled block by block and our street was protected by the threat of retaliation. Today the cops are too fat and busy socializing to scare off the gangsta kids who are doing most of these crimes.

The detectives need to be using facebook and twitter and track these kids because when I look at the tweets from my area, a lot of the local tweets are full of gang cryptic speech indicating that they may be organizing crimes. Maybe I’m giving them too much credit or being paranoid, but I like my neighborhood too much to leave.

I have lived in an apartment building on Bay Ridge Parkway between Third Avenue and Ridge Boulevard in Brooklyn since 2002. Bay Ridge Parkway is a two way street with apartment buildings on the south side and huge houses on the north side of this particular block. From what I’ve observed, people stay put and there’s little or no transiency. It’s a very clean block and very close to shopping and the local library and many churches. Parking? Fuggedaboutit. Almost as bad as Park Slope. I try not to park my car on my block before a snow storm because I learned from hard experience that, because the snow plows plow both sides of the street, cars are encased with snow. Some people don’t get out until Spring!

I live on West 74th St. between Broadway and soon to be landmarked West End Ave. — one would think a lovely location wedged between the stately prewar bldgs. of West End Ave. and the venerated Ansonia, a Beaux Arts beauty and national landmark. What has destroyed our block? THE FAIRWAY MARKET around the corner on 2127 Broadway. They have taken over our street little by little over the years. Our street is besieged with 18-wheelers day and night spewing toxic fumes and causing gridlock on our narrow little street. Our sidewalks are also blocked with skids, loading equipment and trash piles, with Fairways appropriating public walkways as their personal warehouse. Then there’s the giant rats from filthy sidewalks and trash left out. You would think I was describing a street in Calcutta. Despite pleas and constant complaints to elected officials (city & state), no remediation has been forthcoming and police don’t even enforce illegal parking here. Yes, it’s the Wild West Side and a rat buffet.

East 140th Street between Brook and Willis Avenues in the Bronx. We been trying here with other groups in the community to have a speed bump. The politician here came with the Transportation agency but we still have no seen it! Cars speed past the school to make the light and we need a speed bump near the light. {Please help.

The MTA station is no longer staffed; I have witnessed more than two dozen people either jumping the turnstile or opening the emergency door to let in people without paying, and graffiti, litter and homeless residents have all increased; escalators continue to be out of order more often than not. When at least one is working, it is invariably the down escalator (no signs are posted at the platform level to let people know this, however).

Drug deals continue to be done on a daily basis, with drug seekers lining up in the morning and afternoon, in plain sight; requests for the precinct to act on the location have gone unheeded, as have the reports of drug activity and dogfighting around the corner.

Rats are a real problem this winter… but they’ve been a real problem all year, so nothing new there.

Parking is impossible to find unless one coordinates alternate-side parking times with errands and comes back 45 minutes before the time expires, to sit in one’s car and read until the time is up.

Plowing wasn’t a problem except when it came time to move the car… at which time, one had to drive over mounds of packed snow from the plows. The street sweeper didn’t even bother, just driving on by.

Local merchants continue to struggle with the bad economy and the huge numbers of unemployed in the neighborhood.

The block: 180th-181st Street, between Pinehurst and Fort Washington Avenue.

Welcome to the war zone! W. 58th St. between Sixth and Seventh Ave.
One traffic lane is blocked due to a construction project that will last three years. The other traffic lane is blocked because the Essex House hotel uses it as its personal
loading dock – because they don’t have one! . When delivery trucks don’t line the street their uncovered and overflowing dumpsters do. Calling 3-1-1 is a joke. If the city wants to make alot of money, send agency inspectors down this block to write summonses for all the violations going on there.

When the crack house across the street burned not long ago, it became the last in a line of beautiful, historic, and totally neglected properties on our block owned by a 92-year-old slumlord, notorious for destroying every property he acquired.

It will be weeks before the couple next door to the crack house will be able to live in their severely damaged Civil War-era row-house. But the two have vowed to return and to continue to build the community theatrical company they created, that just completed its successful first season.

In the course of their personal crisis, they told my wife and me, they were fed, given shelter and other forms of assistance they could never have anticipated, by people throughout the neighborhood.

So now, instead of a crack house across the street, the hanging-out on the stoop, the endless honking of gypsy cab drivers picking up or delivering customers, we will live with a plywood fence around a burned out crack mansion. And, judging from the pace of the work going on in their house, it looks like our burned-out neighbors will return sooner than later.

Life here can be a struggle, as it is in many city neighborhoods. But the neighborhoods where life seems serene and problem-free never seem quite real to me.

For nearly three months now, there has been a cooking gas outage affecting about 5 apartment buildings buildings and some 50 tenants on the south side of my block on E. 17th Street near the Union Square. Con Ed has made no official statement. The landlord has said nothing thus far. His rental agent has plastered four memos about the crisis on apartment entry halls, the last being in early December. He claims we are all the “mercy of Con Ed and the Department of Buildings” to get service restored. Efforts by tenants to get this stonewalling character to be more forthcoming have been unavailing. The NYT does not seem interested. Tenants are lawyering up. One began withholding rent last month and the rental agent deposited an eviction notice outside his door for all to see. “No class at all,” said a neighbor, summing it all up.

I’ve been screaming on here about my short block on East 92nd Street between 1st and York Avenues for a couple of years now.
It’s already been ruined with over crowding mainly of both sides of the street parking, and I don’t think anything can be done at this late date.
So, there!

Ill mannered children at the busstop making a mess at the sidewalk( candy wrappers, report cards, paperbags, hats, gloves. All kinds of things make it in and over my fence. The older kids and adults leave condoms used and unused.

I have to say the summertime is the best. No school children. The block is neat on our end) and we all plant flowers. very well kept. The neighbors are good when I see them. We don’t talk much now just rushing in and out of the cold weather. We talk when we are shoveling snow. My neighbors are nice, quiet and respectful. We live in the good part of the block. The further down you go the more noise and loud music and confusion.

The problem is parking. people blocking my driveway. having to knock on someones door to ask them to please move their car. I had to call the police once and they got a ticket! some people think the spot in front of their house is theirs. All in all it’s not bad for the Bronx. I am thankful

My block is like many outer borough blocks – garbage blows onto my street daily. We live in the south Slope on 15th St in Brooklyn. For the rent we pay, and the taxes we pay, I can’t believe how dirty my street is at times. New Yorkers, I think, have a very low standard for living conditions, and for what they demand the government do with our tax dollars. I come from Montreal, where the streets are clean and there are loads of services I would never imagine getting from the givernment here (only because the government does so little!!), and with the state, federal and city taxes combined, my tax rate is about the same! At the very least, we should be able to live without garbage flying around in the outer boroughs!!

I live on DeKalb Ave. in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The state of our block, in one word, is bad.

Since the bike lanes were enabled, there has been a marked increase in traffic. This might be coincidence, but traffic changes designed for the ease of all the new downtown Brooklyn co-op and condo construction has resulted in our mainly residential street turning into a speedway. Other commercial streets nearby aren’t nearly as busy. The bike lanes, while welcome, have narrowed the increasing heavy traffic stream, resulting in a dangerous situation for pedestrians and bikers alike.

There have already been many pedestrian casualties, including the death of a young woman riding a motor scooter. On our corner, at times, there has been an accident a week because a cross street has no traffic signal.

This area is home to at least 10 -15 schools, including pre-k, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and colleges. It’s only a matter of time before speeding traffic kills a child on his or her way to school.

Speeding and increased traffic on DeKalb Ave. has been brought to the attention of our local politicians, but the bike lobby is too strong to want to alter the bike lanes, and the developers are too strong for our elected officials listen to pleas to reduce the traffic flow.

I hope when Mayor Bloomberg finally leaves office, that he takes Janette Sadik Khan with him. We may have a chance for positive change once she’s out of office.

Garbage is everywhere! There’s a problem with garbage pick up as well as snow removal. That whole sanitation department needs to be reevaluated to determine whether there is an adequate number of workers and enough equipment to do the job taxpayers pay for and expect. The outer boroughs clearly get the short shrift.

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